Burnout.
No energy, or too much?
Happy New Year!
As we welcome 2024, I keep thinking about the paradoxical stillness and movement of January: when we refresh the calendar and perhaps make resolutions, but the earth remains dormant and cold, here in the northern hemisphere.
I love winter. Even after the holidays, when winter settles in for three or so quiescent months, I wish I could stretch those months into five or six. Winter is so clean. It’s the unforgiving, cleansing purity of winter that invigorates me.
But winter doesn’t energize everyone. My best friend, who grew up in Arizona and spent most of her twenties in Southern California, purchased a sun lamp to counterbalance the darkness of Utah winters. The literal darkness, she tells me, amplifies any signs of burnout. If she’s burning out, she’ll burn out faster without sunshine.
That explanation conjures up almost literal imagery for me: a flaming woman, chasing the sun’s energy so she won’t burn out.
I can’t remember the first time I heard or used the term, “burnout,” to describe the condition of exhaustion and disillusionment that afflicts many overworked, and often undercompensated, individuals. In the early 2000s, when I fueled my pre-lupus body with energy drinks stashed underneath my bed (*grimace*) and committed to chronic over-studying and under-sleeping, “burnout” was not the word I reached for when I crashed or failed. As a young student, I took it for granted that I wasn’t working hard enough when I sensed the inertia of overwhelm; and any time I grew apathetic towards my work, I assumed it was because something tangential or exterior, like hopping on the job market after the 2008 recession, had sucked the joy out of learning. It did not occur to me that I might have, or even could have, burned myself out.
By 2015, though, when I started my graduate studies, the word for this phenomenon was decidedly “burnout.”
“Burnout is real.” That’s what my colleagues and I reminded each other and our students as we juggled concern for well-being and achievement anxiety. Like when a professor wishes you a “restful and productive” winter break.
Despite what I’ve perceived as a shift in the zeitgeist between my undergraduate and postgraduate years, burnout is not a recent, or even relatively recent term. It emerged in the mid-1970s, from the research of American psychologists Herbert Freudenberger and Christina Maslach [1]. At that time, burnout was recognized as a social phenomenon only. The academic community had decided that burnout, if it existed at all, was the problem of mentally disturbed individuals only. 🙃
Today, academics find the concept more interesting.
I am not a psychologist and therefore have never studied burnout from that angle. But as a humanities scholar with a focus on energy language, burnout fascinates me. Figuratively, burnout suggests not only too much labor, but too much passion. To burn out, there needs to be a fire in the first place. The conservation of energy principle is invoked here: energy is neither created nor destroyed, but transformed from one form to another. The entropy law, too, seems relevant. With each transformation, energy becomes less work-available. So, what are we shoveling into that furnace, transforming it into the burn of impassioned labor until nothing remains? Some scholars suggest the fuel here is our self worth, displaced by or mistaken for labor. Others suggest burnout is caused by sustained affective labor.
Or, thinking back to my best friend’s winter burnout, can we burn out from too little fire? If our flame flickers in the cold and burns out into darkness, how are the implications different from those of burning too passionately, too quickly? What if we burn steadily, but for too long? Is there a metaphorical wick length?
Such questions are the crux of this post, and I only just scratch the surface here. Truly: the shallowest little scratch, and this post is much too long. There’s a lot to dig at. The energy language of burnout comes straight from the cultural imagination. Scholars did not christen this phenomenon. As we will see, it was coined independently within two completely different disciplines: poverty law and health care. Maslach and her co-researcher, Susan Jackson, noticed that both lines of work demand affective labor from professionals, and they concluded that the “helping professions” create a risk of burnout [2]. Over time, however, our study and understanding of burnout has broadened. I believe one of the most convincing definitions of burnout is Ayala Pines’s “existential perspective,” which argues that individuals who stake their life’s meaning on their work are candidates for burnout. This is why, Pines explains, “burnout tends to afflict people with high goals and expectations” [3]. I understand this on a deeply personal level; although, to my mind, it’s also a myopic explanation of how existential burnout operates and needs a little more breadth.
Surely, whatever we’ve been calling “burnout” since the 1970s has been around for much longer than that. We’ve been burned out by existential threats more dire than our career identities. Maybe the existential fire isn’t a passionate one, re: my work is who I am and all I do, blah blah blah. Maybe it’s simply the combustion that drives the labor of surviving generational trauma. Tiana Clark reminds us that, “[n]o matter the movement or era, being burned out has been the steady state of black people in this country for hundreds of years” [4]. I may have burned myself out by mistaking my worth for my academic and job performance, and the consequences are indeed material (would I have lupus today if I’d done [fill in the blank] differently?), but that is a privileged experience of burnout. As I’ll cover later, the stakes of achievement mean more to those with marginalized identities, and taking on more work puts one at risk of burnout. To generate a broader picture of burnout, we need to integrate diverse perspectives into its definition.
So what is it? Who burns out and how? And how can we read the energy language when we study examples of burnout? I peel back some of those layers in this post. Unlike my nineteenth-century energy research, burnout is a newer research interest for me. I’ve been chewing on this material for about a month, perhaps holding onto it for longer than necessary for an initial post. But considering the richness of labor and energy baked into its language, I feel like burnout has been waiting for me to take a crack at it. Let’s get started.
What Is Burnout?
These days we use the term, “burnout,” quite liberally compared to its original definition. Social psychology researcher Christina Maslach credits health care professionals and poverty lawyers for contemporaneously and independently coining the term. In the ‘70s, she was studying the condition that health care workers called “burnout.” When she described her research to an attorney friend, he mentioned that poverty lawyers used the same word to express their own affective exhaustion [1]. Maslach concluded that burnout afflicted those in “helping professions.” She defined burnout as “a psychological syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment that can occur among individuals who work with other people in some capacity” [5].
If you’ve ever worked a service or caregiving job, then you know what Maslach was driving at. Helping professions often extract a deep physical and affective toll from their workers. The definition of burnout ends there for Maslach; and yet, if we look at the Oxford English Dictionary, the scope broadens to generic work, rather than limiting burnout to helping professions.
Here’s the OED definition:
“originally U.S. physical or emotional exhaustion, esp. caused by stress at work; depression, disillusionment” [6]
As the OED definition indicates, more recent work on burnout extends this phenomenon to practically all professions, a change to which Maslach has responded with skepticism. She argues that “the focus on the social interaction between the provider and the recipient has been lost in recent years as there has been an increasing emphasis on job factors and the use of I/O [Industrial/Organizational] theories and variables” [5]. I am not here to criticize Maslach. She developed the leading psychometric measure of burnout (the Maslach Burnout Inventory, or MBI) and dedicated her career to defining, measuring, and legitimizing a phenomenon that seemed beyond the pale of serious research fifty years ago. But without any formal psychology training, I’m team-OED on this one.
I believe anyone can burn out, which is why I want to consider burnout from a different angle. Let’s unpack some of the energy language involved. As I mentioned earlier, the concept of burnout had a grassroots beginning. Because the term, burning out, wasn’t coined by academics, and because it surfaced from the cultural imagination, there is something especially visceral about the imagery of burning out.
If you look at it one way, burning out is almost Romantic. Like, big R Romantic: feeling big, burning bright, being consumed, dying young.
If you look at it one way, burning out is almost Romantic. Like, big R Romantic: feeling big, burning bright, being consumed, dying young. The Romantics believed that we generated art and poetry from our energetic core, yet there seems to have been a price involved for expending vitality too liberally. As William Blake’s Devil reminds us, Romantic energy favors passion above pure intellection [7]. The energetic core is physical. The Romantics meditated on emotions recollected in tranquility and emptied those recollections into poetry. And despite its egregious meditations on “purifying” the “real defects” of the common man’s vernacular, we all remember Wordsworth’s 1800 preface to Lyrical Ballads for its argument that “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” [8]. Producing Romantic poetry was not a mere intellectual task; it was energetic, affective labor. John Keats obviously did not contract tuberculosis from writing poetry, but the image of the twenty-five-year-old Keats, consumptive and dying, wasting away and writing feverishly, gestures to the energetic passion of burning and consuming.
I don’t know about you, but when I was twenty-five I was a tiny baby and had accomplished hardly anything substantive. I certainly wasn’t flaming out at the height of my career. But I also can’t write poetry.
There was, even before the codification of thermodynamics laws, a sense of energy conservation that extended to bodies and their limitations. And because the concept of energy is often flattened into capital, or metaphors of capital, we have long been accustomed to describing energy as something we can spend or save. In Susan Sontag’s seminal Illness as Metaphor, she considers consumption from this angle, as both tuberculosis and capitalism. “Early capitalism assumes the necessity of regulated spending, saving, accounting, discipline - an economy that depends on the rational limitation of desire,” Sontag explains. “TB [tuberculosis, or consumption] is described in images that sum up the negative behavior of nineteenth-century homo economicus: consumption; wasting; squandering of vitality” [9]. Consumption, as disease and as economic behavior, is therefore anathema to the logic of early capitalism.
In other words, because the consumptive patient does not regulate the expenditure of their passions and energies, because they squander their vitality, they waste away. Here, I am reminded especially of Dickens’s Richard Carstone, who, after a long period of dissipative behavior and reckless expenditure in anticipation of inheriting a fortune, literally wastes away. In the BBC adaptation of Bleak House, Richard dies of tuberculosis. But Dickens’s novel suggests that Richard’s death is related to the entanglement of energy and capital: that he wastes away because he has recklessly expended. He has been consumed. There’s a kinship here, I think, with the logic of burnout.
It’s not perfect, though. What about the “depression / disillusionment” part of burnout? That’s not giving me Keats or Wordsworth. It’s not really giving me Richard Carstone, either. Definitions of burnout in psychology literature indicate that depression and / or disillusionment are key elements of a burnout diagnosis. One doesn’t usually flame out and stop working, but rather flame out and keep going. Once the burn is gone, you’re just coasting as a husk. Psychologists acknowledge this as a crisis of morale, as well as exhaustion. Maslach and her colleague Susan Jackson argue that “reduced personal accomplishment” is a pillar of burnout, and is recognized by “reduced productivity or capability, low morale, withdrawal, and an inability to cope” [5]. The feeling I get from this angle isn’t so much the energy of self-immolation, but rather of running on fumes.
What gets one to this point, of course, depends on who you are. It depends on your lived experience, your embodiment, and how you move through the world. It depends on your privilege and on what life throws at you. But Anne Helen Petersen opines, and I don’t disagree, that burnout is “the sensation of dull exhaustion that, even with sleep and vacation, never really leaves. It’s the knowledge that you’re just barely keeping your head above the water, and even the slightest shift - a sickness, a busted car, a broken water heater - could sink you and your family” [10]. Burnout is when you’re hanging on by a thread, and you keep hanging on.
The Question of “Calling”
The advice that if you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life feels ludicrous enough that I’m not sure people buy it today, if they ever did. I’m not saying I’m good at chasing the dollar and doing work I like sort of fine. I’m not. I am very, very bad at this. If I’m not researching and writing (not lucrative and definitely work) I start drooping and eventually wither like the saddest plant you never watered. But at least I know when I’m being exploited.
The narrative of being “called” to your work elevates the moral imperative of your labor above your compensation for that labor. Unless one has been called to do religious work, which has a different valence and a literal connection to one’s belief in God, the idea of being called to a profession implies that one’s labor is holy work. For most of us, it isn’t, yet when “called,” we behave as though we should be honored to submit to exploitation. If you pick up recently-published books critiquing contemporary work culture, you are likely to find a section in each on America’s love affair with the Protestant work ethic. For example, Petersen’s book on millennial burnout, Can’t Even, explains that the “idea of a ‘calling’ stems from the early precepts of Protestantism, and the notion that every man can and should find a job through which they can best serve God” [10]. Devon Price’s Laziness Does Not Exist likewise traces what he calls the “laziness lie,” or the myth that if you’re not consistently productive you’re lazy and slacking, to the Puritan mindset [2]. (Puritans were English Protestants.) All of this is true: we’ve infused a Puritanical moral code into the ethics of labor. As a Victorianist and an Energy Humanities scholar, though, it troubles me for reasons that trace back to the initial framing of the thermodynamics laws.
Because the scientists who developed the thermodynamics laws were Protestants (they were Scottish Presbyterians), the original language of thermodynamics is steeped in the Protestant work ethic and its economic implications for Britain. I discuss this in slightly more depth here and will absolutely expand on this subject in a future post. For now, though, the upshot is that the science of work production (i.e., energy) is the bedfellow of the Protestant work ethic. The morality of labor is therefore the historical bedfellow of work production in any of its modalities: mechanical, biological, economic, and so forth.
So when you think about a consequence like burnout, you’d assume that all this apparent morality, all that passion, would sustain one’s labor. If the Protestant work ethic were a watertight ethos, then indexing work and holiness (or at least morality) should be enough to prevent burnout. Right?
That’s psychologist Angela Duckworth’s argument, anyway. In her book, Grit, she argues that we should all find ourselves a “calling,” rather than a “career” or a “job” [11]. Despite the tone deaf impracticality of this suggestion, I don’t think it’s a bad thing to want to find meaning in one’s work. Like I said, I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t do just that with my own work, and every one of my student evals has included a comment along the lines of: “Man, she really gets passionate about that Victorian stuff…” But Duckworth isn’t telling us, “find meaning in your work.” Instead, she’s telling us to make work our calling in life.
That distinction can mean the difference between burning out and laboring healthily. There’s a famous study by J. Stuart Bunderson and Jeffrey A. Thompson about zookeepers called “The Call of the Wild: Zookeepers, Callings, and the Double-Edged Sword of Meaningful Work” [12]. Bunderson and Thompson expose the high educational requirements and low average pay for zookeepers’ jobs. The reason zookeepers put up with that kind of exploitation, according to this study, is that they feel “called” to zookeeping.
When Duckworth cites this study, it appears as supporting evidence for her argument that finding a “calling” keeps you going and going like the Energizer Bunny, burnout be damned! But I haven’t discovered mountains of literature agreeing with her. Moreover, I have yet to find an actual, living zookeeper who agrees with her. I’ll admit, my sample size here is small: I know only one zookeeper. And yet! That zookeeper left her “calling” because her working conditions were abysmal; she burned out; and now she works a corporate job she likes just fine, more or less.
Duckworth’s argumentative thread throughout Grit maintains that passion is an antidote to burnout. When we look at the clinical research published by burnout scholars, though, the opposite seems to be true, with the caveat that burnout is precipitated by perceived failure when one is emotionally involved in one’s work. Pines’s existential perspective on burnout argues this position. She explains, “If you don’t feel a devotion to your cause… if you are not emotionally involved in your work - you are not likely to burn out. But if you are devoted to your work and are emotionally involved, if you expect to derive from your work a sense of existential significance - and you feel that you have failed - you are a likely candidate for burnout” [3]. Passion does not insulate us from burnout; but it can, coupled with perceived failure, precipitate burnout.
Burnout Isn’t Monolithic
I’m ending this post with some thoughts on perspective. We can’t discuss burnout without considering how embodiment, privilege, and lived experience color one’s burnout and its particular existential flavor.
Working too hard never felt like a choice to me, but the truth is that it was. If I’d slowed down a little, I wouldn’t have lost my food security, my home, or likely even my job. I did lose my excellent health. I almost certainly developed lupus, in part, because I prioritized my work above the material needs of my body. I made some of those choices because I am a woman. But even so, my race and class position have given me advantages like health care, a medical team, support networks, and physically non-demanding jobs.
This is not what the wake of everyone’s burnout looks like.
My generation, those of us born between 1981 and 1996, may have popularized burnout. Anne Helen Petersen’s book on Millennial burnout proposes that this is because we Millennials have internalized the idea that our value as humans is the same as our value as workers. She writes, “Millennials became the first generation to fully conceptualize themselves as walking college resumes. With assistance from our parents, society, and educators, we came to understand ourselves, consciously or not, as ‘human capital’: subjects to be optimized for better performance in the economy” [10]. I can’t argue with this. I hear a version of this critique from my husband all the time. Middle school was all about how you’ll never do well in high school if you don’t work hard enough now. High school was all about how you’ll never do well in college (or even get in, and you’d better get in) if you don’t work hard enough now. College was all about how you’ll never get a job if you don’t work hard enough now. And then there was the recession and student loans…
Say what you will about Millennials and our avocado toast, many of us have never learned how to not work all the time.
Yet the whole concept of Millennial burnout seems a little narrow. Petersen acknowledges the limitations of angling burnout from a generational point of view, especially when critics of color have responded to Petersen by flagging the intergenerational complexity of burnout in marginalized groups. For instance, Tiana Clark explains, “I wonder if this zeitgeisty phenomenon - this attempt to define ourselves as the spent, frazzled generation - has become popular because white, upper-middle-class millennials aren’t accustomed to being tired all the time? Aren’t used to feeling bedraggled, as blacks and other marginalized groups have for a long time?” [4] And as one of Petersen’s interviewees, a Black woman named Elly, puts it: “As a black woman I feel as if I were born tired. Every woman in my family has always worked since adolescence almost until the day they died. [...] I was born burned out” [13]. Black people of all generations and all socioeconomic backgrounds in the United States experience chronic burnout from dealing with systemic racism and the fallout of enslavement. And people who arrive in the US experience assimilation burnout. Gabriela, a first-generation immigrant, explains: “On top of everything else, you have this constant guilt of never being enough for this country. So you have to excel” [13].
And one last thing!
Now that we’ve established that burnout isn’t a monolith, I want to return to burnout and chronic illness in the context of embodiment. Burnout has real, material consequences on health, and these consequences stratify along lines of privilege.
Let’s take lupus as an example. Lupus is a chronic, autoimmune disease. Symptoms include joint pain and swelling, chest pain, low-grade fever, fatigue, rash, mouth sores, hair loss, and other obnoxious surprises; but mostly you tend to look pretty “normal.” Because lupus oscillates between periods of flare and remission, it’s easy to pass as able-bodied when you’re in remission and it’s possible, at least sometimes, to push through flares without raising suspicion that you’re in agony. It is too easy to limp along this way, actually. Unless you can’t raise your head (which happens) or your hands develop a debilitating rash (which also happens), you look pretty much like your old self. In fact, you look so “normal,” whatever that means, that you’re terrified any mention of your illness or any absenteeism will elicit suspicions of malingering. So you work harder, and it makes your disease worse.
Now add some intersectionality to this subject position. You’re a woman of color and you have lupus. Actually, most people with lupus are women of color [14]. In addition to fielding the burnout of intergenerational trauma and systemic racism, you’re facing the sisyphean task of either a) hiding your disease so people will take you seriously, or b) convincing people (including doctors) to take your symptoms seriously. Black women deal with racist medical stereotypes tracing back hundreds of years. While all women with chronic pain or mysterious and troubling symptoms are at risk of facing skepticism from medical professionals, Black women are both diagnosed with more conditions of chronic pain, and are dismissed more often when they present with it [15]. As a white woman with this disease, I can only imagine how exhausting it must be to live with lupus in a Black femme body.
At this early point in my research I’d tentatively say that burnout is a problem of both too much and too little energy. Clearly, flaming out like a Romantic poet is not the same as the never-ending slow burn of intergenerational trauma. But working too hard too fast, investing too much of yourself and failing, and laboring too long without rest or fair compensation are all pathways to burnout. While the topic of burnout does seem to be “trending” now, I’m still troubled by our glorification of grind culture and hustle culture. Stick around for more energy and anti-grind content. Thanks for subscribing, and if you enjoyed this post, please share it!
Citations
[1] Maslach, Christina, and Wilmar B. Schaeufeli. “Historical and Conceptual Development of Burnout,” (1-16) in Professional Burnout: Recent Developments in Theory and Research. Wilmar B. Schaeufeli, Christina Maslach, and Tadeusz Marek (eds.), 1993. Routledge, 2017.
[2] Price, Devon. Laziness Does Not Exist: A Defense of the Exhausted, Exploited, and Overworked. Atria Books, 2021.
[3] Ayala M. Pines. “Burnout: An Existential Perspective,” (33-51) in Professional Burnout: Recent Developments in Theory and Research. Wilmar B. Schaeufeli, Christina Maslach, and Tadeusz Marek (eds.), 1993. Routledge, 2017.
[4] Clark, Tiana. “This Is What Black Burnout Feels Like.” BuzzFeed News, 11 January 2019. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tianaclarkpoet/millennial-burnout-black-women-self-care-anxiety-depression.
[5] Maslach, Christina. ”Burnout: A Multidimensional Perspective,” (19-32) in Professional Burnout: Recent Developments in Theory and Research. Wilmar B. Schaeufeli, Christina Maslach, and Tadeusz Marek (eds.), 1993, Routledge, 2017.
[6] Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “burn-out (n.),” July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1105766921.
[7] Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. 1790.
[8] Wordsworth, William. Preface to Lyrical Ballads. 1800. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Lyrical Ballads. 1798 and 1800. Michael Gamer and Dahlia Porter (eds.). Broadview, 2008.
[9] Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor and Aids and Its Metaphors. Picador, 1977.
[10] Petersen, Anne Helen. Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020.
[11] Duckworth, Angela. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. Scribner, 2016.
[12]. Bunderson, J. S., & Thompson, J. A. (2009). “The Call of the Wild: Zookeepers, Callings, and the Double-edged Sword of Deeply Meaningful Work.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 54(1), 32-57. https://doi.org/10.2189/asqu.2009.54.1.32
[13] Petersen, Anne Helen. “Here’s What ‘Millennial Burnout’ Is Like for 16 Different People.” Buzzfeed News. 9 January 2019. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/millennial-burnout-perspectives
[14] “Women’s Unseen Battle: Shining a Light on Lupus.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 25 May 2023. https://www.cdc.gov/healthequity/features/lupus/index.html#:~:text=People%20from%20certain%20racial%20and,and%20have%20more%20severe%20symptoms.
[15] Cleghorn, Elinor. Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World. Dutton, 2021.